The Horizon Line at Dusk

A… boy squinted and the horizon appeared just inches from his face. He strained his eyes and it was many, many feet away. All the while, he squeezed his fingertips together, grabbing on to the horizon line as if it were a fishing line. Now nothing seemed too far away and too eternal and too strong – nothing even seemed to be too thin and too flimsy and too dying and gone. Both of his hands held on to the horizon line as if it were a fishing line and it was as if the waves crashed within him. He was a bag tied together by an invisible wire. But there were tiny holes perforating him no matter how much he tried to cover up. He pulled his elbows up to his eyes – his face flushed and pink – so his arms paralleled the horizon. He focused intently on the mouth of the world where the foaming sea touched the drowsy clouds. The mouth slowly closed as the sun died and everything darkened. Wrinkles only he saw caught the light from the last sunset reflections off the water, though the shadows did not appear. Wind lightly enraptured him, drawing his focus away to the crystal moon and the nostalgic fluttering of trees. He almost let go of the world. But he corrected himself, staring back toward the horizon, ensuring that his fingers never left their position. It was then that the boy realized how much his fingers quivered, so very frantic and afraid.

A hand grasped his left shoulder, and a voice informed, “We should be on our way now.” The boy ignored the voice, choosing to wait until the full night arrived and the horizon line dissipated from his grasp, which would happen shortly. “Bro, come on now. Stop making me babysit you all the time.” The boy thought the voice was smug, insulting, and condescending. The boy also hated himself for his thoughts. Those who judged him were unaware of that fact. He pushed all thoughts out of his head, for he couldn’t succumb to the distractions just yet. “Bro! What are you on? Did you take Jimmy’s edibles or something? Because I told you not to!” The boy was shoved and he lost his place in the sky. He stood back up quickly, about to explode in sound, but the horizon had disappeared. He told himself that it must have disappeared before he fell, so everything was alright. Everything was fine and would be fine and had to be fine. “Sorry, I didn’t think you would fall. Just come on.”

“Fine. Oliver.” The boy shoved past the voice, which did not belong to any visible body. The boy could not look at that which whispered insulting things behind his back. He could not zone out the voices, but he could choose not to look.

“Hey, T. Loosen up a little. It’s summer.” The boy did not respond. He vanished into the night, silently stalking down the beach, his eyes darting toward the bushes lining the sandy dunes. Tall, spiraling plants – ones he could recognize, but chose not to – pierced the sky, grabbing on to the stars with their split hands. Thin prongs touched and loved the night. Nature united and that loosened the boy’s tight shoulders slightly. Leaving the beach path, remembering the car hidden up ahead from a bushel of out-of-place roses, the boy slipped his sandals off and stepped onto the dirt path, letting wet soil hug his toes and rid them of the sand. Whilst Milo walked the Earth and flowed through the sky, the depth below each footstep on the muddy path and the gravity of each spot of air pulled his limbs. When the trees weeped on his shoulder, their moss-like extremities petting the top of his head and back of his neck, he almost moaned. He wondered constantly why such distractions existed as the pleasant touch of a weeping willow. When the car appeared, the boy smiled within himself, and vanished into the shotgun seat. His brother was still on the beach, the boy acknowledged. He would be for a while. So the boy closed his eyes. He would be unable to fall asleep, but at least he wouldn’t have to keep looking.

When Oliver sat down in the driver’s seat, coughing smoke out the window, he found his brother pretending to sleep in the shotgun seat. “Come on, Tristin.” There was no response at first, then Oliver heard words said so softly he wondered if his brother truly muttered them.

“It’s. Milo.” Oliver felt his brother glaring at him so hard he could not bear to look. But Milo’s face was tucked away in the nook between the plastic and the glass, then the plastic and the leather.

Not yet knowing how to love, Oliver let Milo stew in his misery. When his friends climbed into the back of the car Oliver finally pulled away from the beach, leaving Milo’s horizon line behind. The music was playing too loudly for Oliver to hear his brother crying. Or, maybe, Oliver was playing the music loudly so his friends didn’t hear Milo crying. It wouldn’t have mattered anyways. Milo always made sure nothing slipped out, stifling his noise by pressing the cloth from his sleeve so hard against his mouth and nose that not even spittles of saliva and mucus dared to come out. He was just that type of boy. He was selfish, too – just like his brother.

Oliver looked over and it pained him to see his brother so changed. The wind soaring in through the rolled down windows couldn’t even budge Milo’s hair now that it was short. To Oliver, Milo was a flimsy boy. His brother did not choose where he reached or stepped. Oliver assumed that was why he was so quiet. When Oliver – speeding down the highway – put his hand on Milo’s shoulder, he felt tense muscles and knew the body was turgid. Oliver wondered how such a turgid body could be pushed over so easily, how someone who could be as sturdy as an oak was uprooted with just a light shove.

Oliver stopped looking at his brother, the fantasy becoming too much for him to bear. He looked back at his friends as they implored him to drive faster to their vacant beach house. Their bodies fell over each other like gas station giants. It was as if when they were together they were one swaying phantom. Extremities flailed, attached to the giant blob of their coalescing bodies. For a brief second alarm flared in Oliver’s head. No, no, I can’t be one of them. But he didn’t push deeper. Some part of him knew that the only way for him to fight was to lose. Oliver couldn’t look at his friends anymore, so he turned back to the road, floored the Road Ranger, and made his way home as quickly as possible. He thought about slowing down and looking outside, but he was tired of looking.

When the Road Ranger pulled into the cobblestoned driveway, the friends spilled as one of their drinks would out of the left-hand passenger door, even though the right was closer to the home’s entrance. Milo exited quietly, making a note to write about the group scathingly later, in a letter he would send to his pen-pal Jefferey. His parents set up the program for him when he was eight, and eight years later, he was still in touch with his friend. As he trudged through the garage door, his back tired and aching from forcing itself to elongate hours before the car period, he saw the shadow of a person flicker through the undercut of the door. Dazed in trepidation for his brother’s friends, his face scrunched up and tears welled behind his eyes, though he forced himself to keep them in. He ran to his brother and hugged him. The last time Oliver had been in trouble, his parents said that they would pull him from Dalton if the behavior continued. They were stricter than most of the other parents, which is what made Oliver’s lifestyle scare Milo so much. Milo wished his brother would just behave and step into line, or step out of sight. Being so grand and so frivolous was a combination that never helped anybody do anything. Oliver, deciding to feel good about himself, held his hand up for his friends and bent down on his knees. Oliver was not that much taller than Milo, so the result was the older brother infantilizing the younger by staring up at him through rocky eyes, distorted by the light, and breathing more than saying, “What’s wrong bud?”

“Shadows that-” Milo, too consumed with a mix of frustration and love bubbling in his stomach, slowly creeping up his throat like acid reflux, stated, unable to finish his thought. The psychosomatic bile reached his mouth and he erupted, “You should ask her to run me a bath,” before realizing how stupid the retort was and streamlining to the door. Milo didn’t want to hear Oliver’s pitiful laughter, so he plugged his ears by pressing his antitragus with the tips of his fingers – to avoid dirtying his ear canal. Almost as if a toddler with a stuffed bunny, he slumped, and lazily opened the door. Since his head was down, he saw only the shadow of the brute before she bumped into him. A small splash of liquid graced his shoulder as he fell and grazed his head against the corner of the marble console table. Angels swarmed his vision and he felt his heart press against the bones lining his chest. He saw a plastic red cup swivel on its rim before cyclically accelerating to a stop, becoming a stable silo where mites and vapor lived. The only thing Milo could think was that if it were Oliver who fell, he would have gotten up right away. His eyelids became a ship, his eyelashes leakages, and the tear trough the flooding hull. As the ship sank, so did his depth perception. The silo blurred and soon disappeared. How fragile and weak and terrible and disgusting the human skull is. A survivable scrape was all it was, but in Milo’s head he truly thought he was dying. A loud sound reminding him of the giant raucouses of his youth rumbled in his ears before fading to a silence in slow reverberations.

Milo felt his body being lifted. And then he felt numb. He blinked slowly and his vision flickered between concerned onlookers and tall grass that hardly concealed a big blue broken sky. For a brief moment he lay in the field (his palms touching soft, damp soil) staring at the intersection of grass, Earth, and sky. But that perfect liminal reality quickly disappeared as he felt warm water sodden his scalp and felt extra-glaring lights pain his retinas. He swatted his hands in front of his face, pushing away Oliver’s wet, healing cloth.

Milo opened his eyes and awoke in a grand field with tall grass and puddles of water.

To be continued...